Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for March 05, 2011

It’s all about marketing baby!

It’s how you spin the product that counts!

Max, you have a very cool dad. Don’t ever forget it.

JAN…..you must be cool to have known………………

seems like he’s forgiven :D

Wally great speech. Max now love bubble gun. Mom you need to learn.

Oh yeah, KabBuch - teach boys to love to kill stuff - aliens or not! Wonderful! Why don’t we just send all baby boys to the recruitment centers the day they’re born.

Barbaratoo, drop the hash pipe and get real… that is the way we’re genetically designed. The only way man could thrive was to conquer his enemies who were competing for the same resources. We can claim to be “enlightened” all we want, but our instincts are to defend the tribe, attack our enemies and conquer them. We just do it now with money instead of rocks, sticks or guns.

Barbaratoo - You don’t have to teach boys to love to kill stuff; they’re born that way. Really. It’s how hunter societies survive and we all sprang from hunter societies.

Wally should be a car salesman!

No, Wally isn’t slimy enough to be a car salesman. He’s just an understanding dad.

Give a boy a stick, and he will use it as a gun to play soldier or as a sword to play knight. Give a girl a stick, and she will use it as a scepter to play princess or a wand to play at fairy princess. One rules with direct authoritarian might and bloodshed, the other with cunning duplicity and magnanimity.

In the book “The Male Brain”, the author cites a mom who wanted to bring up her son without presupposed notions of gender roles, so she gave him a doll (not an “action figure”) for his bithday. The boy took it out of the box, gripped it around the torso with its legs pointing out, and ran around shouting “Bang bang!”

She also described an experiment where juvenile apes (chimpanzees, maybe) were give an assortment of toys to play with. The females would play equally with the plush stuffed-animal type toys and the toys with wheels and such, but the males ignored the “dolls” entirely to play with the toys that “did stuff”.

Different brains, different creatures entirely.

I believe kids know what sex they are at the age of 2, and they know which sex is preferred.

I remember talking to a guy who entertained himself by making comments to parents about their new babies, but reversing the stereotypes. For example, if it was a girl he raved about how strong she was, and if it was a boy?? I don’t remember exactly - how sweet and loving maybe? how graceful? anyway you get the point, which is that people don’t really realise how much they are doing to influence their children.

The parents that he teased got very upset.

My 8 year old son has started to build guns of lego bricks only now during the last year, and his 6yo brother only from his influence - so I doubt the gun/wand thing is an inborn thing, but rather the way the parents teach them. I agree with RinaFarina that parents don’t really understand how much they influence their kids from day one. (And that very probably is also true for apes who have even more fixed gender roles.)

I say, good work, Wally! ;) And I think he is a cool dad - lucky Max.